FOOD insecurity is near endemic now in Zimbabwe, with climate change being blamed for our low agricultural productivity.
The so-called captains of the manufacturing industry also complain there is low industrial capacity utilisation.
Many conferences and breakfast meetings are being held to discuss the challenges facing the economy.
Foreign Direct Investment is touted as the major component of the suite of solutions to the challenges facing our economy.
But if no produce is being harvested by farmers, then there are no raw materials to feed industry, hence low capacity utilisation, low employment figures and missed revenue collection targets by the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA).
So Zimbabwe must put its money where its mouth is: agriculture.
As before I will state upfront that I am no economist.
I am looking at things as I see them.
I have no theory to relate to; just common sense, which is said to be not that common after all.
Some will ask why we should have hunger in the midst of plenty.
Finger-pointing is unlikely to provide the answer!
But we also must tell each other the truth.
Zimbabwe has a varied beautiful landscape, an excellent climate and as I learnt a few days ago, south of the Sahara, the largest volume of impounded water in various dams and man-made lakes.
A variety of rich soils, including some of the most fertile, occur across the length and breadth of this great land.
Did I not read somewhere that Zimbabwe is said to have the best climate in the world when various factors are taken into account?
The richest piece of real estate in the world some have claimed, hence our troubles with vapambivhu and vapambipfumi.
And yet “nzara yafunya chisero mudzimba dzamaDzimbabwe.”
We have almost come to accept that as the status quo.
How do we explain this contradiction?
Zimbabwe has produced many agricultural scientists who are scattered all over the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the English-speaking world from Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand to neighbouring South Africa.
These trained scientists represent a rich and diverse human capital capable of moving Zimbabwe’s agricultural agenda miles ahead of other countries.
But they are missing in action, as it were!
At home, the small-scale farmers have proved their pedigree, agriculture-wise, by contributing over 70 percent of the marketed maize grain from after independence in 1980 well into the 1990s.
Their capacity to produce food crops sustainably has been partly compromised by the introduction of non-food cash crops whose markets have suffered periodic collapse.
Imagine Mbuya vaMuchigere planting tobacco right next to her doorstep!
Not maize, not pumpkins or beans or nzungu or nyimo, but tobacco, so she can also make money!
While it is agreed that farmers must also make money, the poor small-scale farmers do not seem to have adequate technical guidance and support to embark on a relatively sophisticated inputs-intensive crop such as tobacco?
Tobacco is banned in many places and in China, probably the largest market in the world, the fine for smoking in public has been hiked from US$2 to US$38.
Policy support for the production of local food crops such as drought-tolerant small grains, sorghum, pearl and finger millets as well as legumes needs to be significantly strengthened as these are key elements of sustainable food security.
Meanwhile, indigenous science on the production of the local crops has been marginalised with formal agricultural science education actually looking down on African agricultural knowledge and practices.
These attitudes have been adopted by our younger generation.
Much of the rich knowledge and experience has been lost to the extent that Europe is re-discovering the African agricultural science and re-exporting it to the ever-grateful Africans!
I argue that the answer to our now chronic food challenges lies in our capacity to act decisively to address our challenges.
In all cases, the challenge has been to get people to do the right things.
In short, our food insecurity is a reflection of human factor weaknesses partly induced through our education system.
Let us take the so-called educated in Zimbabwe.
They do not engage in physical work as this is considered below the dignity of an educated person.
The silent instruction to children is: “To avoid doing agricultural work, you must go to school.”
So the ideology that is killing our agriculture is one that says education means freedom from physical work.
The more educated, the more divorced you become from engaging in physical endeavour.
But God said: “You will eat of your sweat.” (Uchadya cheziya)
What is the new reality that we have created in Zimbabwe?
Does formal education liberate us from doing the basic economically critical task of producing our own food?
What happened to our Chimurenga philosophy of ‘Education with production?’
Now many people hate hard work, but what have the educated done to take the pain out of farm work?
Many labour-saving devices were invented by slaves who sought to lighten their physical workload.
Necessity became the mother of invention!
Have our agricultural engineers developed labour-saving devices or machines to till, plant, weed and harvest our crops?
Is the science beyond African comprehension?
Of course not!
Can we honestly sit in our offices and boardrooms and swear that we are stumped, we cannot find a solution to Zimbabwe’s food challenges?
I do not think so!
The problem is the human factor!
Individually and collectively we seem incapable of seizing the bull by the horns and wrestling it to the ground, as it were.
There is no substitute for hard work; miracles and ‘minana’ will not feed Zimbabwe.
We must work!
Our struggle for economic emancipation continues!